PDA

View Full Version : vivitone mandolins



cooper4205
May-15-2006, 12:05am
i was reading an article on loar and it mentioned him building mandolins with his own company, vivitone. were they any good or are any even around today? i know loar wasn't nearly as famous as now, but why do you never hear about these? (besides the fact that the loar F5 kinda oversyhadows everything else in the mando world)

danb
May-15-2006, 5:23am
Pictures crop up occasionally.. and I've seen one or two instruments on ebay.. Roger Siminoff would probably be a good person to ask!

markishandsome
May-15-2006, 10:01am
I think there are some pics at emando.com

Jim M.
May-15-2006, 10:48am
Vintage Instruments has some pics:
http://www.vintageinstruments.com/photos/museum/vivimandoful.jpg

Skinner had several ViviTones in an auction last year, IIRC. I bid on some, including an electric violin, but they all went for more than I was willing to pay. They seem interesting for historical reasons, but everyone I've heard from who has played one says they aren't very good.

cooper4205
May-15-2006, 2:44pm
that is completely different than a gibson. did V-Tone make anything similar to the F5 (or F style?)

Rick Turner
May-29-2006, 4:59pm
No "F" styles. What you see is what you get.

Banana has several along with some ViViTone guitars. They're odd, but really fascinating.

I helped to restore Loar's personal solid body electric viola which Roger Siminoff sold to Hank Risan. That one, I have to say, sounds just incredible. It may be one of the best electric fiddles on the planet.

Jim Garber
Jun-15-2006, 7:32am
One for sale here (http://www.mandolincafe.com/cgi-bin/classifieds/classifieds.cgi?search_and_display_db_button=on&db_id=19106&query=retrieval).

Jim

oldwave maker
Jul-11-2006, 11:48pm
back detail on one I saw friday at intermountain in salt lake city

oldwave maker
Jul-11-2006, 11:58pm
Detail of the soundhole with 2x4 top bracing and 2, yes 2, soundposts. 1/4" thick celluloid pickguard. I was laughing with Leonard and Kennard about Loars possible involvement with the gibson F5 master model design. He must have inhaled lots of something after leaving the kalamazoo plant! My swiss had more muenster tone and gouda volume than this farwood......

OregonMike
Jul-12-2006, 12:35am
While I'm no Loar historian - I have to agree with Mr. Bussmann on this one. As hard as I try I can't reconcile Loar's involvment as an acoustic engineer in both the F5MM and the ViviTone.

I realise he may have been seriously hindered by non-compete contracts when he left Gibson, but I just can't imagine how these ever got created with him in the building (or the ViviTone garage for that matter).

Now back to playing my '24 Gibson...

Martin Jonas
Jul-12-2006, 3:52am
I'm intrigued by the figure of the wood used for the back: it looks to me like the Vivitone may have spruce both for the top and the back. Maybe that's related to the use of soundposts, in an attempt to couple the top and back and make both oscillate.

Martin

oldwave maker
Jul-12-2006, 9:14am
With those f holes on the back, his main market may have been pregnant women doing in utero musical training. The few experiments I did using both spruce tops and backs made for very unfocused fundamentals, maybe I shoulda installed a few soundposts in each one......

Jul-12-2006, 9:51am
On the Vivtone mandolins I have a few thoughts. The first is that sound Loar was looking for had nothing to do with the sound we associate with his F5's today. I doubt Lloyd was looking to make it bark. The second is that Vivitone was a startup company and he was probably trying to find a way to build his instruments faster and cheaper. The third is that there seemed to be a little of the snake oil salesman in the man (read some of the advertising copy from that era regarding the Gibson mandolins). Maybe he figured he could make up what the Vivitone lacked in content by putting the right advertising spin on it. That's not an attack on his character, it's just an observation based on the state of advertising for business in general at that time. Finally, he might have seen the mandolins as a short lived part of the business with the electric instruments being the future. They were simply a stop gap until the real products could be introduced.

delsbrother
Jul-12-2006, 1:10pm
Detail of the soundhole with 2x4 top bracing and 2, yes 2, soundposts. 1/4" thick celluloid pickguard. I was laughing with Leonard and Kennard about Loars possible involvement with the gibson F5 master model design. He must have inhaled lots of something after leaving the kalamazoo plant! My swiss had more muenster tone and gouda volume than this farwood......
Just trying to picture this scene - you plugged it in and played it through an amp?

markishandsome
Jul-12-2006, 11:05pm
As hard as I try I can't reconcile Loar's involvment as an acoustic engineer in both the F5MM and the ViviTone.

Have you heard Bob Dylan's new album?

Creative people run out of ideas all the time. Or they continue having ideas but they never catch on or stand the test of time. Heck, no one even cared about the F5 until 25 years after Loar. You can't win em all.

Jul-13-2006, 7:26am
Have you heard Bob Dylan's new album?
Warn me next time before you do that (and I'm a Dylan fan) http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/laugh.gif